Multilingual Speakers

When a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don’t expect them. And interference can manifest itself not just in vocabulary slip-ups, but even on the level of grammar or accent.

Separation of languages happens by a suppression of the non-relevant languages. A kind of attention mechanism. The problem is called language-control in multilinguals. Errors are a great way to understand this. Sometimes, it seems like they inhibit the dominant language so much that they actually are slower to speak in certain contexts. A reversal of language dominance, where you end up making a mistake in your primary language

Wow, Spanish and English errors have “pero” and “but” as something common. I personally have shifted to the understanding part of language with that particular word.

Through the use of eye-tracking technology, Gollan and her team found that these mistakes were made even when participants were looking directly at the target word. She explains that when mixing languages, multilinguals are navigating a sort of balancing act, inhibiting the stronger language to even things out ​​- and sometimes, they go too far in the wrong direction

Sometimes bilinguals will produce the right word, but with the wrong accent, which is a really interesting dissociation that tells you language control is being applied at different levels of processing

As it turns out, the Italian migrants were more likely to reject correct Italian sentences as ungrammatical if these did not match correct English grammar. And the higher their English proficiency, the longer they had lived in Canada, and the less they used their Italian, the more likely they were to have found the correct Italian sentences ungrammatical.